


She

by willowoftheriver



Series: fearfully made [3]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Denial, F/M, Female Balinor, Female Merlin, Genderbending, Half-Sibling Incest, POV Uther Pendragon, Period-Typical Sexism, Realization, Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 08:52:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8006473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uther tries to not have a realization. And Gaius tries to make it better, as usual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She

**Author's Note:**

> No. Merlin and Arthur still don't find out yet. I think the entirety of Camelot is going to realize before they do.

Uther isn’t sure how long he spends in hell. It’s dark and cold there, reeking of his own blood and filth, and in between the physical pain all that exists is Morgana’s mocking, scornful face and the burden of his own regrets. He’s consumed, writhing under the tortures of a girl he once loved, his own _daughter_ , and those of his own mind, and for so long, there is no escape.

Then. Then, so suddenly, there’s _light_. He’s pulled from the darkness and reminded that yes, _yes_ , there’s something beyond the four walls of his cell. Arthur’s face is angelic, like water on a parched throat, and it’s the last thing he sees before he slips away, back into the dark.

This is a warm darkness, however, very different from before. Almost pleasant, for a short while as he drifts, barely aware, only to turn suffocating as the heat increases, becomes scalding.

He’s trapped again, unable to move or breathe or think. Sometimes he gets faint impressions of something beyond, cool liquid on his brow and the hum of familiar voices, but they’re fleeting, slipping away no matter how he tries to cling to them.

At some point, he realizes that somewhere, far away, he’s laughing, laughing hysterically because he’s so hot he’s sure he must be roasting from the inside out, just the opposite of all the sorcerers. He doesn’t know why that’s so funny.

He gets another glimpse of that world beyond when he’s shocked by the splash of freezing water all around him, his skin tingling as fire meets ice. Things come into focus then, just for an instant, as he flails and fights to not go under. Hands hold him down, hands attached to arms and bodies that lead to heads and faces. There’s Gaius, wrinkled mouth moving as he spouts nonsense words about fever and delirium. Arthur is beside him and then there’s—there’s someone _familiar_ , pale skin and black hair and blue eyes, and though a different name sits somewhere on the edge of his mind, all he can think is, _Balinora_.

He reaches out for her, grasping, but she just gets further and further away, a slow, gradual fade.

There’s nothing after that. He’s unaware of everything, be it heat or cold or dark or light, and the passage of time is so distorted that when he next wakes, two weeks have passed in an instant.

He opens his eyes to a kingdom he cannot even recognize. The change that he devoted the last twenty years of his life to is in tatters, all decency and rationality long gone, and he can’t even blame it on Morgana. It’s all due to _Arthur_.

All the people, from the peasants to the nobles, adore Arthur now more than they ever have. He managed to retake Camelot from Morgana with only a small group of knights, beating her forces back into Cenred’s kingdom and then successfully warding off reinvasion. He’s delivered them all from her tyranny and proved himself a brilliant and courageous leader of men.

He’s King now in all but name, and everyone is so besotted with him that they’ve overlooked the witch whore at his side.

_Merlin_. Gaius’s niece and apprentice. Uther had never liked the girl, but he’d tolerated her early on because of the mindless, occasionally suicidal, loyalty she demonstrated towards Arthur. Eventually, however, she’d become more trouble than she was worth when she turned up pregnant with his son’s bastard, a bastard that she’d somehow convinced Arthur to _want_. She’d filled his head with ridiculous notions of _marrying_ her, a _serving girl,_ and making her half-peasant, misbegotten whelp his _heir_.

He’s heard word that she gave birth to a son during Morgana’s reign, a healthy one that Arthur openly acknowledges as his. Uther’s first grandchild, and it apparently came out of the womb seeping magic from every pore. He hadn’t bothered to learn the thing’s name after hearing stories of how it lights candles and breaks windows with its mind when it’s angry.

To think that his son would sire a _sorcerer_. It’s unthinkable, _horrific_ , but Uther knows that he’s not at fault—the child was corrupted by its mother’s tainted womb, her magic seeping in and destroying the infant’s innocence before it was even born.

Merlin, the bumbling, insignificant fool from nowhere, is a _witch_. She’s lived right under his nose for three years, working in his own _household_ , and yet somehow, she escaped detection.

And even now that everyone knows, she walks free instead of being immediately thrown on the pyre along with her spawn. His people have come to love a _sorceress,_ to embrace her and her evil.

It’s enough to make him nauseous, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He ordered Arthur to have her arrested for witchcraft, but he refused pointblank, his mouth set in a defiant line. And not only that—he countered with _demands_ , insisting that Uther treat her civilly and approve a marriage between them and even listen to her advice about the war with Morgana.

It all would’ve been laughable to ask even just a year ago, but Uther’s position isn’t what it was. He’s the King whose indiscretion with another man’s wife produced a bastard daughter who held the people in a grip of terror for the better part of a year. Arthur is their beloved savior, their golden Prince. Publicly disagreeing with him would be dangerous when it’s so clear who would garner all of the support.

Morgana’s popularity had already waned by the time she stole his kingdom out from under him with laughable ease. It would be even simpler for Arthur to do the same.

He’s never been so powerless, and he’s never hated anyone in quite the way he hates Merlin. The first time she comes to his chambers, to discuss the war and her impending marriage, his fingers twitch with the desire to scratch her eyes out of her head. If he wasn’t still on his sickbed, slowly and laboriously recovering from the tortures Morgana took such joy inflicting on him, he might’ve even tried.

She’s no longer wearing her peasant rags when she enters his room, but neither is her dress in the style of a noblewoman. It’s sheer and flowing, and cut in a way that he recognizes. Nimueh and Balinora and Morgause, all the High Priestesses of the Old Religion, had favored a similar style.

She’s a vision of all her abhorrent predecessors, just as ethereally beautiful. Pale skin and flowing black hair, vivid blue eyes almost glowing with her unnatural power. He can’t blame Arthur for being seduced.

“King Uther,” she greets hesitantly. She doesn’t curtsey.

“Sorceress,” he returns, spitting the word.

She frowns, eyes narrowing, hands clenching at her sides. “Yes,” she agrees. “I’m the _sorceress_ who gave your throne back to you.”

“Don’t take credit for my son’s actions, girl.”

She barks out a short, humorless laugh. “Are you still really that blind? Arthur and the Knights are good warriors, but they’re no match for magic. You can’t win a war against two sorceresses unless you have one on your side, too.”

“I crushed magic for twenty years with no such help.”

“You hunted down a disorganized group, one at a time. They never formed an army against you, not like Morgana and Morgause have now. You pushed them for twenty years; now, they’re finally pushing back. Do you really want to see the vengeance they’ll take for all the blood you’ve spilled?”

“I’ve done what was right!”

She leans forward abruptly, slamming her hands down on the footboard of his bed. “You’ve done what you’ve done out of petty, misplaced blame. Do you honestly think I don’t know? Morgause wasn’t _lying_. You utter hypocrite. You’ve persecuted magic for twenty years when you used it yourself!”

“Hold your tongue, you lying little whore! You know _nothing_!”

“I know _everything **.**_ I know that all the sorcerers you’ve had executed didn’t kill Arthur’s mother. I know that the one who cast the spell that did, you didn’t even manage to find! _I_ killed her, to save Arthur’s life! I’ve spent the last _four years_ protecting him, _every day_ , from everything you couldn’t!”

He doesn’t believe she killed Nimueh, that she could possibly be strong enough to have done so. But if, somehow, she _did_ , then he only hates her all the more for depriving him of his revenge. “You’re a scheming enchantress lusting after the power Arthur can give you! You’ve done nothing for my son!”

“Did you really accept that Gaius just happened to find a cure for the Questing Beast’s bite in a book somewhere? There’s no such thing! I went to Nimueh and offered up my own life in place of his, and when she betrayed me, I gave _hers_. I saved him from Sigan and Valiant and the dragon and even your _precious Morgana_! I’ve given everything for him with nary a thanks and yet I would willingly go back and do it all again!”

He thinks of each incident in turn. The Questing Beast. Cornelius Sigan. Valiant. Kilgharrah.

The first few, he doesn’t know how to refute. It was true that he had never heard of a cure for a Questing Beast bite before Gaius claimed to have miraculously found one. There was never any explanation for how Sigan’s rampage was stopped, why his spirit had so abruptly vacated that servant’s body. Valiant he only remembers thanks to the spectacle the snakes on his enchanted shield had made in the arena, coming alive so prematurely it was as though he had no control over them at all.

But the dragon?

“You’re not even intelligent enough to tell your lies well. Take the dragon—no single sorcerer’s magic would’ve been effective enough to slay it.”

“I didn’t use my magic. I just told him to go away.”

“And it obeyed you?”

“He has to.”

That gives Uther pause, a hitch in his breath as a word comes to mind he hasn’t thought of in two years. _Dragonlord._

It was an ability passed from parent to child upon the former’s death. He hadn’t relished in it, but that had been the reason he’d had to exterminate not just the Dragonlords themselves, but also their children. He’d hunted every last one, except . . . except . . .

“Was your father a Dragonlord?” he asks, hopeful, trying to remember the girl’s age. Could she have been born before the start of the Purges? Near the beginning?

She hesitates, true hatred flashing in her eyes for the first time. “No,” she says eventually. “My mother.”

He has a vague recollection of Gaius’s sister, the woman who had been introduced as Merlin’s mother. Their meeting was four years ago, it’s possible she could’ve died in the meantime and passed on the ability, but Uther knows without a doubt that it didn’t run in Gaius’s family. And even if it had, Gaius himself was the oldest child—he would’ve come into the inheritance from their parents, not his younger sister.

“I was unaware it ran in Gaius’s bloodline,” he says, crafting the statement in such a way as to come off as loosely threatening and thus pressuring.

Another hesitation. “It doesn’t. Gaius’s sister is my mother but . . . not by blood.”

He looks at her closely, then, closely and in a way he never has before. He studies her features, every inch of them, from hair so black it almost glints blue in the light and eyes a cold blue like ice to high, sharp cheekbones and overlarge ears. She’s too tall and thin and lanky, but her nose and her chin and her skin . . .

God help him, he sees _Balinora_ in all of it for the first time.

“What was your mother’s name?” he asks, more sharply than he had intended, but he can’t control his voice as icy fingers of doubt and horror begin contracting around him.

She eyes him suspiciously. “She’s dead. What does it matter?”

“You . . . remind me of someone I once knew.”

“I suppose I would,” she says slowly, distrustfully. The hate has hardened her eyes and set her mouth in a scowl, and he can feel the first stirrings of uncontrolled magic in the room, the air growing heavy and caustic.

He knows without a doubt in that moment that however much he hates her, she matches it for him.

“You knew her,” she finally elaborates. “And it’s because of you that I never did.”

“Her name?” he repeats, more quietly than before. His head is spinning and a part of him doesn’t even want to hear it, but to another the thought of never knowing is unthinkable.

He holds his breath while she considers, scrutinizing his face with those angry, loathing eyes. He wishes he could just demand it as her King, but he knows well enough that no matter his title, he’s not her King and never has been. Arthur is.

She must find something in his face that she was looking for, because she eventually gives him an answer.

“She was a sorceress at your court. Balinora.”

 

.

  

The rest of the day, all Uther can do is remember. Balinora, the witch, the whore, the enchantress, the seductress. Beautiful and horrible Balinora. She was a Druid, Dragonlord, High Priestess, one of Nimueh’s closest associates—and powerful, almost unbelievably so at times.

She had been too dangerous to be kept alive, yet his own foolish sentiment had spared her from the pyre for almost the entirety of the Purges. By the time he had finally realized what needed to be done, she was one of the last to be sentenced to death. They’d dragged her away struggling and screaming, and today, twenty years later, he can still hear her.

_“I’m with child! You can’t murder your own child!_ ”

He’d already known of her condition but hadn’t been sure whether to believe her. She had already had an idea that his mercy was running out, and what better way for a woman to save herself from harm than to pretend to be with child?

And if she really was, he hadn’t had any guarantee that it was truly his. Though, that in and of itself had been a moot point, as what desire did he have for a half-Druid bastard that would inevitably become a Dragonlord?

He’d sentenced her to the pyre, content to never have to think of it again. Only, she didn’t burn.

His suspicion that Gaius had helped her escape had been all but confirmed during Kilgharrah’s rampage, but he had never been able to figure out where she’d gone. He’d hunted her for years, risking war from all the neighboring kingdoms by sending his Knights across borders to look for her, but there had never been any hint.

Only now does he realize that her daughter had been here all this time, right in front of him.

Her daughter. _Hers_. Not his. He’s already fathered one witch, not another. Not the one who bore his son a child.

It’s unthinkable.

Yet he can’t _stop_ thinking about it. He sits, staring at the wall, fear churning in his stomach as his mind goes to places he doesn’t want it to. He’s so lost in it that he barely notices Gaius come in for his nightly check, opening his mouth automatically to swallow down the potions he offers.

“Gaius,” he finally begins, his voice a rasp.

“Yes, Sire?” says Gaius absentmindedly, eyes on the nightstand as he arranges the medications Uther is to take throughout the night.

“How old is your niece?”

“Very nearly twenty now. I can hardly believe it. She was barely sixteen when her mother first sent her to me.”

“Your sister . . .”

Gaius glances at him. “Sire?”

“Your sister. Not her mother.”

Gaius pales, fingers clenching around the vial in his hand. “I—whatever has given you the idea that—”

“The girl’s a Dragonlord, as I’m _sure_ you already know.” He doesn’t bother to hide the bitterness in his words. Gaius was his oldest friend; they had already known each other probably before Balinora was even born, yet Gaius had spent the last four years betraying him for the sake of her daughter. There’s no doubt in his mind now that the physician always knew what Merlin was. “That’s an inherited ability.”

“Perhaps her father—”

Uther gives a sharp bark of laughter, half-hysterical, at that. _Her father._ “No, no, I don’t think so. I hunted the Dragonlords to the ends of the Earth—I _eradicated_ them. Except for one.”

“Balinora,” says Gaius faintly, eyes flickering around Uther’s face but never quite meeting his gaze.

“Balinora,” he repeats, with a brittle smile. “The one person you’ve always been willing to betray me for. You helped her escape.”

“She was with child!”

“My child, she claimed. If she weren’t playing me false, I would have a child nearing twenty around this time, wouldn’t I, Gaius? Perhaps a girl. Another bastard witch with aspirations for a crown. Tell me—do I have three children? A daughter plotting to kill me and a son and a daughter _bedding each other_ as they plot to kill their sister? Or did she lie? Did she betray me and then try to pass off another man’s child as my own in the hopes of saving herself?”

Gaius meets his eyes then, and they hold each other’s gaze in silence. There are no words, not for what passes between them, as all of Uther’s being screams to him. _Lie, Gaius, lie. For once, lie for_ me _._

And Gaius understands.

“I was always fond of Balinora, milord,” he says, diverting his eyes to the floor. Shame, at what he’s claiming he did then or what he’s doing now—Uther doesn’t try to distinguish. “I—I did not want to betray you, but when she came to me, I couldn’t . . . help myself.”

Uther nods shakily. “I do not blame you. It was the same when she led me astray from Ygraine.”

Gaius swallows convulsively and continues: “She told me she was . . . was with child shortly before you sentenced her to die. And as much faith as I have in your judgment, Sire, I found I could not let . . . my only child die before it took its first breath. I am sorry.”

The words are hollow but he clings to them. They’re all he has.

He can’t summon the anger necessary to rage at Gaius, to shout about the consequences of freeing Balinora, the position that little _bitch_ she was carrying now has him in. The power she has over Arthur might as well be the keys to the Kingdom, and it’s inevitable at this point that one day she’s going to be Queen. She’s going to sit on Ygraine’s throne and wear her crown, like they’re somehow _equal_ , and the thought of that sorceress-peasant ( _peasant, peasant, peasant)-_ harlot taking his wife’s place sends bile inching up his throat. (And maybe, _maybe_ , it sickens him for another reason, because she’ll be at Arthur’s side, his Queen, his _wife_ , and that—that—)

_None of it would’ve ever been if you had just let her burn, Gaius, you fool, you_ traitor—

But Uther cannot bring himself to say any of it. He’s too busy clinging to those words, _my child, could not let_ my child _die_ , to do anything but send Gaius away, unable to look at him any longer.

_Gaius’s daughter,_ he repeats, a mantra, _Gaius’s daughter, Gaius’s daughter, not mine. Gaius’s._

But words only go so far, and all Uther can truly do is put his face in his hands and weep.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Gaius uses 'placating lie'! It's not very effective!
> 
> Oh Uther. I hate you and love you in equal measure. Though it begs the question, if I didn't have fond memories of Giles, would I still feel the same way?
> 
> I do genuinely have plans for the fic where Merlin and Arthur find out. Though probably expect hearing a bit from Hunith and Morgana before then.
> 
> Though the title's really nonspecific, I did take it from the song by Akira Yamaoka off the Silent Hill 1 soundtrack.
> 
> Thanks so much for all the kudos and comments on the two previous stories!  
> Anna


End file.
